During the Bush administration there were only two American commanders of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Under Obama there have so far been five. There has been a new ISAF commander nearly every single year that Obama has been in office. The only exception is 2012 when Obama was too busy trying to win an election to bother further sabotaging a losing war.

General McKiernan’s firing was put down to the need for fresh ideas. McKiernan was deemed too “old school” because he wanted to fight an old-fashioned war against the Taliban while Obama Inc. believed that the war couldn’t be won by beating the Taliban, but by winning the hearts and minds of Afghans. It was a fashionable and doomed strategy that required sacrificing the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers to political correctness.

The old-school general who had once said, “I don’t understand ever putting your men and women in harm’s way, without their having the full ability to protect themselves. That also means operating on actionable intelligence to defeat insurgents, and protect your forces. That’s how you keep your soldiers alive,” was clearly not the man for that job.

There were idiots dressed as polar bears and one idiot dressed up as a whooping crane. Occupiers showed up in black hoodies with their faces covered, not so much as a disguise, but for warmth. The Forward on the Climate or For the Climate or Away from the Climate rally was a real cross-section of American idiots. There were electric bicycle salesmen, yoga instructors, Quakers and environmental science students.

Lots of white people raised their fists in the air in solidarity with something. Possibly the climate. Robert Redford wrote an editorial in support of the protest, but didn’t bother flying a private jet over to take part. There was an awkward dance party. There were a few obligatory giant puppets. Everyone was cold, but everyone pretended that the planet was burning up.

Kids roped in by their idiot parents shivered while holding up signs about solar power. College students swarmed around the buses that brought them and texted while old hippies made speeches. There was a giant model of a pipeline or maybe a windmill. No one could tell. And there were lots of signs about how everyone loved Mother Earth.

Jon Huntsman writing an article about why conservatives should embrace gay embrace at the American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, is already a strange marriage.

Huntsman is pushing the thoroughly unoriginal and discredited idea that the Republican Party has to stay competitive by becoming socially liberal and fiscally free market. That was the Romney campaign in a nutshell and it was not terribly appealing. The last election should have been a reminder that a socially liberal country of broken families is not going to vote for small government or the free market. Not when it depends on government aid.

Huntsman says that every marriage should be treated equally under the law. Which it is. Gay marriage innovates a new entity using a name that does not apply to it. It’s the usual leftist tactic of broadening a definition until it no longer means anything. But if Huntsman really means that every marriage should be treated equally, why not recognize polygamy? There is no answer, because there is no logical argument. And 10 years from now, he will be arguing that to win Muslim votes, the Republican Party should recognize Polygamy.

Amanda Collins is a young rape survivor. While in college in 2007, she was raped 50 feet away from the campus police department office at the University of Nevada-Reno and was lucky to get out alive. Her attacker was James Biela, a serial rapist who raped two other women and murdered another. He attacked her at gun point in a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of a concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus.

Breezy Point, Queens is a heavily Irish neighborhood in New York City. It took a lot of damage in the storm and it brought volunteers from Ireland over to help it rebuild.

But unlike the Haitian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Chinese neighborhoods in New York City… there is something very wrong about having an Irish neighborhood.

Or at least that is what Sarah Maslin Nir and the New York Times have concluded.

"But complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Breezy Point is the whitest neighborhood in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride."

There is no such “dark side” or “xenophobia” to other neighborhoods in the city. It’s okay for every other group to live together and have a common history. A Dominican neighborhood is something to be celebrated. But an Irish neighborhood has a dark side.

Lemon comments "The kind of minds that write this stuff are the most and worst of the bigots because they can never see past color, race, religion or ethnicity. For them that is the whole of a person and people are labeled and stuck in slots according to color, etc. and are never to be let out. They are obsessed with race and religion."

THE LOW INFORMATION GAP

Is the conservative blogsphere incapable of producing mockery or user-friendly memes? It is and does on a regular basis. What it does not have is a way to integrate the political content with a primarily pop culture site like HuffPo or BuzzFeed.

On the right, sites are primarily political. DailyCaller and Blaze have that sort of pop culture, but it’s a sidebar. And if you want to target low information voters, you don’t need more political sites, you need more apolitical sites that also cram in some politics in between all the other stuff.

Conservatives sites tend to focus on our own base. They don’t look beyond it. The left thinks bigger than we do. It monetizes its propaganda and finds more sophisticated ways of passing it around.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s Tuesday call to his Russian counterpart has gone unanswered for nearly a week after North Korea tested a nuclear device.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Thursday that “the Foreign Minister has not yet chosen to return the call” to Kerry, but that Kerry was “relaxed about this” and not concerned.

At least Kerry is relaxed about the complete implosion of American influence on the international level. He is totally not waiting by the phone asking Victoria, “Why won’t he call me? Why? I promised to be extra flexible.”

On Friday, she said the two still had not talked, and “If they (Russian diplomatic officials) are too busy or otherwise engaged, the offer stands, and we’ll continue to do other diplomacy.”

Sure. Kerry can talk to a lot of countries. Like Ghana. Or Uruguay. He doesn’t need Russia. He never even liked Russia. Even if Russia calls him now, he won’t talk to Russia.

During All-Star Game weekend, Jackson Lee presented with a “Certificate of Congressional Recognition” embossed with a gold seal.

“Your core values of hard work and integrity has helped improve youth in the Houston community,” declared the certificate, which was signed by Jackson Lee.

Young Jeezy’s core values are drug dealing and rapping about dealing drugs and selling Snowman t-shirts which stand for drug dealing. Some of those shirts are being worn by elementary school kids, so he certainly is doing his part to improve the youth of Houston.

Other things that Young Jeezy is famous for include his “My President is Black” song with lyrics like “Mr. Black President, yeah Obama for real/They gotta put ya face on the 5000 dollar bill”.

“There’s always confusion when you have a tragedy of that sort and Americans are killed,” Rice told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on Thursday. “The bigger tragedy, Jon, is we’ve spent all of these months trying to figure out the origin of some talking points, which were cleared at the highest levels of the intelligence community and, in my opinion, not enough time doing the service that we owe to our fallen colleagues.”

The bigger tragedy is apparently not the crime or the coverup, but the investigation of the coverup.

As investments go, gun manufacturers are a pretty good one. Teachers’ unions are a really bad one. But New York and California teachers’ unions which are funded by stealing from taxpayers, many of them gun owners, are using that stolen money to divest from gun manufacturers, even though this moves their larcenous pension funds closer to the brink of collapse, requiring further taxpayer bailouts.

CalPERS, the California public employees pension fund, dug itself into a deep hole with “socially responsible investing“. Those decisions cost the fund billions of dollars and CalPERS is now bankrupting entire California municipalities because of its own corruption and incompetence. Now that it is choosing to divest from the profitable firearms industries, more homeowners will be squeezed out by its corrupt leftist overlords.

But like the rest of the larcenous left, CalPERS doesn’t care. It believes that it can keep off ripping the public forever, even as it is driving entire cities into bankruptcy, and then using that money to enforce its own social policies.

As part of his non-election, which he may try to cancel, Ahmadinejad has kicked off what he declares is a “Viva Spring”. That apparently consists of him releasing tapes of his opponents engaging in corruption. His opponents have been releasing tapes and videos of his cronies engaging in corruption. The tape releases are meant to restore Ahmadinejad’s image as a reformer, but they are infuriating the Iranian establishment, such as it is.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in theory runs the country, has blasted Ahmadinejad for his antics, but can’t remove him because he declared that the rigged election last time around was Allah’s work. And you can’t talk back to Allah when he steals an election. The ridiculous side of this is that the same establishment which brutally murdered and tortured its own people to protect Ahmadinejad’s stolen election are desperately trying to get rid of him.

Others put the Republican problem in starker terms. "They are just a party of white people" was the consensus among all the noted white people at both the New Republic and MSNBC.

However, David Brooks, a neoconservative commentator at The New York Times, believes the Republicans can easily get back in the game if they nominate Barack Obama as their 2016 Presidential candidate.

"Obama already has everything the Republicans lack - hipness, coolness, social media outreach, modern communications expertise, a huge database of supporters, a crackerjack campaign organization, and an unlimited supply of deep-pocketed donors," Brooks writes. "It would take the GOP decades to match any one of those. The failure of Romney's ORCA last fall shows how hopelessly behind they are."

A GOP insider, who wished to remain anonymous, agrees: "The media's love of Mr. Obama is worth ten points in and of itself. They loathe every single one of the GOP candidates - black, white, yellow, or brown - but they love Barack Obama. Republicans could never hope to close the gap working against such a cultural disadvantage, unless they choose Obama as their standard bearer.

Corporately we can better extend our childhood and adolescence. We can put off reasonable responsibility forever and moon poetic about swarming flocks of starlings and decry the cooperative communities of ”corporate” wolves. We sleep-walk our children into the swarm of reflexive expectation, and from there to mere reflex. Without a literal second thought, the reflex becomes the basis of reason. The cause of it is not really forgotten– the predations of life are cruel– it is merely the scapegoat that must be run out of the community so we can get back to a million YouTube downloads of our awesomeness.

It’s why it is frustrating to speak of “pure politics” in regard to Muslim countries. For them, it’s personal to the point of death. And it’s become so futile in our own regard because our own national platform is devolving into a dark religion of reflexes. The typical, tribal scapegoats of party and partisanship are no longer enough to carry away our deficiencies. Our political priests call for sacrifice, our mystical statisticians interpret the economic entrails of the victim and the solution is always what such knee-jerk, mindless gods require: more blood.

11. Sought through Universal Health Care and reducing the military to improve our nation until it resembled Great Britain in real power and influence, and confiscated all guns and ammunition we could lay our hands on to keep pesky disagreements with the National Guard on a name-calling basis, praying only for a disarmed, dispirited, depressed and Universally Medicated citizenry and for the power to rule over them.

The apocalyptic pessimist is different. He is so earnest that he could almost be an optimist. He believes that the end of the world is nigh, and secretly is rather pleased about it. If he is of a scientific bent, he does the following: he takes an undesirable trend and projects it indefinitely into the future until whatever is the object of the trend destroys the world. For example, he might take the fact that Staphylococci reproduce exponentially on a Petri dish to mean that, within the week, the entire biosphere will consist of Staphylococci and nothing else. Man will be crushed under the weight of bacteria.

I offer you an opportunity to maintain a consistency in your policy and win the acclaim of the anti-gun bloc. I strongly urge you to remove from sale on Amazon Books any title of mine in whose title the term "gun" occurs. Two titles come to mind at the moment, Whisper the Guns, and Running Out My Guns. In fact, I suggest that you remove all my titles, for in each and every one of them guns are employed. This would include the whole series of Sparrowhawk, novels about the American Revolution.

Come to think of it, why not remove all titles that feature guns and violence from your listings? If you are going to be so conscientiously and foolishly sensitive and picayune about the matter of guns and gun-violence, it would salve your sense of moral worth with an act of total and unqualified consistency.

Just think of the national acclaim you would garner by performing such an act of contrition. Of course, it would reduce your listings by an unimaginable percentage, and consequently affect your revenue, but, after all, what is money when it is imperative that you do the "right thing"?

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comments:

Is it just me or does every article in your Friday roundup seem as though there is a parallel world where extreme insanity, hypocrisy, idiocy, and a reversion to the mind of the Neandrathal permeates an unbelievable number of people in this country?

How in the world did a 21st century citizen of a first world country end up more ignorant with zero common sense than the lowest of animals? How is it that Americans, who have the most time in human history with more tools at their disposal than ever before chosen to stop using their brains?

I've said it many times but nothing-absolutely nothing-surprises me any longer.

Not only have humans lost their ability and will to think but lost their ability to defend humanity and even lost their will to be human.

Elaine, it happens all the time, all over the world. I remember reading something by a historian who had studied Hitler all his life and he could never figure out how he actually rose to power, in the sense of what really made it happen. Until you live in crazy time you don't realize that people are highly irrational and will simultaneously not care about anything beyond their personal sphere and yet be ready to defend conventional wisdom of the time with utmost ferocity. This too will pass. Not necessarily without a catastrophe.

I am especially pleased about your call for greater penetration of the uninformed class with conservative messages. I reccomended just this a few weeks ago on FR amd am delighted to see it in print elsewhere. Conservatism is the natural language of America. It is only fitting and reasonable that it overcome the plainly un American marxist vomit that passes as liberal bloviation.

Ruling elites are well aware of the fact that an armed populace drastically LOWERS rapes, crimes and murders. It is positive proof that elites want to drastically INCREASE rapes, crimes and murders and render Americans defenseless prey by disarming Americans. Unfortunately, governments have extremely wicked plans for their citizens when they plot to disarm them.